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Increased road salt usage is affecting our lakes. But this cottager group has a solution - Cottage Life

While plenty of cottagers aren’t at the lake when the winter roads are salted, the effects last into many a swim season.

Road salt impacts the lakes and the creatures who make their homes there, as well as the trees along roads. Now, Friends of the Muskoka Watershed (FOTMW) are using citizen science to get to the bottom of the salty situation—which is significantly affecting their lakes in particular.

Chloride in road salt is the most harmful component, says Dr. Neil Hutchinson, a volunteer director with FOTMW. The aquatic life in the Muskoka watershed is especially susceptible to the impacts of chloride because the lakes contain low amounts of calcium, which acts as a protectant. “So low calcium makes aquatic life more sensitive to road salt,” Hutchinson says.

Although the amount of chloride in Muskoka lakes is technically considered safe, it’s trending in a direction that makes Hutchinson nervous. “We’ve seen major shifts in the community of zooplankton over the past 60 years as road salt concentrations have increased,” he says.

Ontario is facing a road salt shortage amidst a snow-heavy winter

FOTMW is inviting locals to participate in monitoring the lakes. Next winter, cottaging citizen scientists can be equipped with small devices about the size of a pocket pen to measure the conductivity of water, which is a surrogate for chloride. “We can therefore obtain data on the relative importance of different sources of road salt runoff and timing of runoff events across Muskoka, and identify hot spots of high input,” says Hutchinson.

7 tips for using less road salt

In the meantime, the good news is that alternatives to road salt already exist. Better options include sand, pickled sand (a mix of sand and salt), or salt brine, which is more likely to stay in place rather than run off into lakes and rivers. More good news: Hutchinson reports that his municipality takes the harms of road salt seriously and has reduced its use there by 40 per cent over the past four years.

Lacking Options: WNY Lawmaker Seeks Use Of Canadian Road Salt | News, Sports, Jobs - Post Journal

Legislation introduced recently in the state Assembly would allow local governments to purchase road salt from Canada.

Assemblyman Patrick Chludzinski, R-Cheektowaga, has introduced A.5890 to amend state law to allow for the purchase of rock salt or sodium chloride that is mined or harvested north of the border after a shortage of rock salt this year has left many towns and villages across the state running short of rock salt with a month to go before spring.

Chludzinski said the New York State Buy American Salt Act, as currently structured, has helped cause the salt shortage by forcing most Western New York municipalities to contract with American Rock Salt, which is located in Livingston County. The bill was signed into law in December 2022 by Gov. Kathy Hochul. The company said in early February that it was struggling to meet the demand created by this year’s cold weather and persistent snowfall.

“We also have taken additional measures to increase supply, including opening our reserve stockpiles; the purchase of new underground equipment to mine additional salt; and construction of more access points to our underground conveyor and bin system to help transport more salt to our processing equipment,” the company said in a news release on Feb. 3. “With these efforts we have successfully increased daily production by over 25%, while maintaining a safe working environment.For further context, in 2024 American Rock Salt shipped 1.8 million tons of salt for the entirety of the winter season; this winter through January 2025 alone we have already shipped over 2.1 million tons of salt. In total, we have mined and shipped more salt so far this winter than all of last year.”

Chautauqua County and the city of Jamestown have said they will begin mixing salt with sand to make sure they have enough salt to finish the winter while the village of Lakewood received a shipment of salt recently that should last the village for the winter. But not all municipalities have been so lucky. Chludzinski said some communities are restricting use of salt to main roads and intersections with stop signs and traffic lights.

“The lack of contract options, therefore, has become a public safety issue,” he said. “Prior to the current law, municipalities in Western New York could purchase salt from an American owned company called Compass Minerals but can no longer because the mine they harvest from is in Ontario, Canada. The intent of the original legislation was to stop importing salt from faraway places such as Egypt, because they were selling salt so cheap to

undercut our own companies’ ability to secure contracts, and their labor practices were not to our standards. This was a laudable goal, and we want to protect the interests of American workers while ensuring our roads are safe and drivable. That is why the scope of this bill is limited only to include Canada which is our neighbor and closest ally.”

The Current Road Salt Shortage Is a Harbinger of Tougher Challenges Ahead – The Colgate Maroon-News

Colgate University students were granted the first “snow day” in years on Monday, Feb. 17 . It was a welcome respite in the middle of February, a month without scheduled breaks from classes or seasonal depression. However, the Weather Decision Group’s campus-wide email may be a harbinger of less welcome developments down the road. 

While plowing efforts can clear most snow on campus rather effectively, it is rock salt, the kind you often see piled up in big sheds off the highway, that is most vital to combating winter-weather-related dangers. If you have been complaining about the lack of that salt on the sheets of ice that continue to underlay most campus paths, you are part of what appears to be the majority. Various (especially less serviced) parts of campus have been virtual skating rinks for months, not least outside my door at Parker Apartments. Has Colgate forgotten us? Not exactly. It could be, rather, due to the major road salt shortage occurring in New York state. 

On Feb. 14, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul declared a disaster emergency due to the shortage combined with the incoming winter storm.

“I mean, this is the worst weather we’ve had in a long time, in terms of sustained cold that requires constant salt on the roads,” Hochul said during a press conference. 

The weather she describes has put serious strain on both institutional users of rock salt like the state or Colgate, as well as consumers, many of whom have been unable to find it at local hardware stores. Sure enough, I called the Tractor Supply located near Price Chopper, and they gave a resounding “no” when I asked if they had rock salt in stock. 

Why don’t we increase supply? It’s logical to think that transporting rock salt all the way to landlocked upstate New York might be the problem, but in fact, New York is home to the largest operating salt mine in the United States. Cleveland, another city hit by salt shortages, even has a mine located directly within the urban downtown.

The real answer illuminates a fundamental problem at work here. For the most part, state governments and other institutional users of rock salt order the amount they need in advance of the season, usually estimating the tonnage and then ordering a bit more as a cushion. This type of purchase comes pretty cheap, sometimes around $50 per ton. However, if more salt is needed throughout the winter, they have to reorder and pay a larger price, around twice the original. Therefore, estimating the severity of a coming winter is imperative to supply the right amount of salt, and that is becoming harder and harder as climate change continues to wreak havoc on the predictability of our weather systems. 

At Colgate, this is sure to manifest in increasing difficulty managing our harsh weather patterns. We are consistently affected by lake effect snow, a phenomenon originating from the variance between the warmer Great Lakes and colder Canadian air passing over them. As we experience record-setting warm summers, those lakes will stay warmer during the winter and cause greater amounts of precipitation in a more unpredictable pattern. That is to say, occurrences such as Monday’s cancellation may become more frequent. 

The University administration will need to make appropriate adjustments, focusing more on managing varying conditions. While many of us lament the mundane and seemingly endless Hamilton winters, inconsistent bouts of extreme weather pose a greater threat to the normality of campus life. Resources needed to conduct that management will be expensive. For example, overestimating salt needs could end with a mild winter — like the ones we saw in the past two years — and, therefore, wasted money. Also, rock salt treatments produce environmentally harmful effects on water quality and wildlife. If Colgate wants to avoid these risks on campus, it could switch to alternatives such as calcium chloride. This chemical, while being more expensive than normal salt, is also even more corrosive to metals such as aluminum found on cars.  

Existing issues on campus will need to be even more urgently addressed as a lack of salt and bad weather combine in the coming decades. Although winters may become shorter and shorter, the intensity of seasonal weather is predicted to increase as climate change induces more frequent polar vortex and lake effect snow events. At Colgate, the split between up and down the hill becomes deeper as uphill paths are left unsalted or rendered inaccessible, and driving becomes more precarious. In another case, the infamously expensive and small housing supply for faculty and staff presents a pressing transportation issue. What happens when current measures become inadequate to maintain the safety of roads between Hamilton and Cazenovia, for example?

Overall, Colgate will have no choice but to focus more heavily on assuring the smooth running of campus during extreme weather conditions as climate change squeezes vital resources, like rock salt. That said, maybe we students will get to enjoy a snow day more than once every couple of years as well.

Many Toronto-area streams are getting saltier and road salt is mostly to blame, conservation experts suggest | CBC News

Crunching under toe, tire and tread, road salt is used to melt ice and snow for safer surfaces, but recent data shows some Toronto creeks and streams are becoming much saltier, posing risks to aquatic life — and salting may be the culprit.

The 2024 data, shared with CBC Toronto by the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, shows chloride concentrations in many waterways have been increasing since at least 2015, with Etobicoke Creek and the Don River being among the saltiest.

"We look kind of longer term, and what we're seeing is that of the 47 stations across our jurisdiction, 36 of them are showing increasing trends in chloride over time," said Lyndsay Cartwright, a research scientist with the TRCA. 

"And that's a big concern."

Lyndsay Cartwright is a research scientist with the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority. (Andrew Neary/CBC)

Too much salt can be toxic for fresh water life, and many Greater Toronto Area waterways are over the safe limit, according to the data.

Some samples saltier than ocean water, says expert

The Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment (CCME) has guidelines for how salty freshwater can be before it becomes a problem for living organisms. It all comes down to the chloride part of salt. At 120 mg/L of chloride, long-term exposure can cause issues. Past that, things become dire.

"When you hit 640 mg/L, species die," said Claire Oswald, Associate Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University. 

"Different aquatic species are going to have different tolerances to chloride, but a lot of the more sensitive ones will die," she said.

Claire Owald, associate professor of geography and environmental studies at Toronto Metropolitan University, said some salt used for winter maintenance gets stuck in soil and in underground water sources, moving slower through the ecosystem. This makes salt concentrations a year-round issue. (Tina Mackenzie/CBC)

Oswald says most of the salt used for winter maintenance works its way through waterways and ends up flushed into the ocean. But, she says, some salt gets stuck in soil and in underground water sources, moving slower through the ecosystem, making salt concentrations a year-round issue.

And that ground water can be well above the safe limits. 

Oswald says her team measured water running off one Mississauga parking lot that had been salted.

"That was over 50,000 mg/L before it went into the sewers and got spit out into the stream," she said.

"It's saltier than ocean water," she added, which has a concentration of around 19,250 mg/L of chloride, according to the CCME guidelines for chloride for the protection of aquatic life.

In Toronto, Oswald says her team recently tested soil water next to a road, measuring over 48,000 mg/L of chloride, which she calls "even more shocking" because of how long it will take to work itself through the system.

Overall the numbers are trending up, according to the TRCA. Parts of the Don River hit 7,560 mg/L, Etobicoke Creek peaked at 10,100 mg/L this past year, with waterways, on average, at their highest chloride concentrations in five years according to the TRCA data.

City says it uses special equipment to measure salt use

Oswald says her team has been working to find a fix, and it's to put down less salt.

"Really we need to put down less so we have to change public expectations," she said.

The City of Toronto has a salt management plan to reduce the amount it uses, writing on its website: "The City is aware of the risks of road salt to the environment." 

Vincent Sferrazza, Director of Operations and Maintenance at the city, says crews have specialized equipment to measure how much salt they are throwing, calibrated and checked weekly. He said the city's plan was "reviewed by academics" and "found to be very effective."

"In some cases it may be a situation of maybe not the city, but other salt appliers, such as the private sector — such as landscapers or other companies," Sferrazza said. "I can't speak on their behalf. I can only say that we at the City of Toronto are very diligent with respect to salt management application."

Contractors, businesses worry about lawsuits

Jon Agg, Owner of Pristine Property Maintenance Limited, says his company has hundreds of maintenance contracts across Ontario and the GTA.

He says his company tries to use less salt because they care about the environment. It also saves them money. A set cost for salt is often included in the contracts, so throwing down extra comes out of his pocket. 

His workers are trained in a program called Smart About Salt, started by the University of Waterloo, which he says taught them about the impacts oversalting has on things like waterways and infrastructure.

Jon Agg, owner of Pristine Property Maintenance Limited, says his company has hundreds of maintenance contracts across Ontario and the GTA. They are lobbying the government to protect winter maintenance workers from slip and fall liabilities so that they can use less salt. (Tina Mackenzie/CBC)

Like the city, Agg's company also uses specialized equipment to measure exactly how much salt workers are throwing on the ground. But he says the risk of lawsuits makes them oversalt for the sake of the business.

"We're salting so much because of liability," he said.

"The biggest issue with my industry right now is the liability insurance: the cost of adjusters, the cost of legal, the cost of paying deductibles, the cost of paying settlements. Overall, that's about 10 per cent of the income we bring in, which is insane.

"It's becoming unsustainable."

Agg says sometimes the owners of the properties themselves are asking for more salt than is needed to feel more safe.

"We've had condominiums and commercial buildings tell us, 'I want to see grains of salt at all times on my property,'" he said. "That's over-salting. If you're salting the right amount, you shouldn't actually see salt."

"I think as a society we've got this idea that more salt means safer, which is not true."

Calls for a provincial standard

Agg is one of about 7,000 winter maintenance contractors represented by Landscape Ontario. Together, they are lobbying the Ontario government to provide protection for operators like him.

He says today, contractors assume all the risk when they sign on to maintain a property. If someone falls, they are open to getting sued.

Instead, Agg says his industry wants to work with researchers to create a standard for how much salt is the right amount to use for safety and the environment — tracked by the calibrated equipment and overseen by a government agency. If workers met that standard, they would be safe from lawsuits.

The province has not yet replied to a request for comment.

"Our hope is, if we can get that standard recognized by the province, that we can actually get somewhere," Agg said.

How a century-old Montreal invention changed snow removal in the city | CBC News

A snowblower by Montreal inventor Arthur Sicard, purchased by the City of Montreal in 1928. (City of Montreal archives)

The challenge facing Montreal snow-removal crews this week is without precedent: two big storms back to back have left more than 70 centimetres of snow to clear.

It's the most in a four-day period on record, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada. A city official marvelled recently that the size of the snowbanks means the blower will need to pass two or even three times to fully clear one side of a street.

Still, the city crews are equipped with far more powerful machines than they were in the past.

Until the early 20th century, the city had to rely on horse-drawn plows, and often solely people and their shovels, to clear away the snow. In some cases, snow wasn't removed at all, as archival photos show. 

Smaller city streets and roads in rural areas were often closed to traffic through the winter months throughout the late 1920s and beyond, said Yves Laberge, a historian and sociologist who teaches at the University of Ottawa.

Saint-Philippe Street in Montreal's Saint-Henri neighbourhood in 1972, when smaller streets regularly went unplowed for days. (City of Montreal archives)

"It was a big issue back then, and it took days after a big snowstorm to return to a normal life," said Laberge, who has documented the history of snow removal in Quebec in the history journal Cap-aux-Diamants.

"In rural Quebec, there were places or villages that were very much isolated from the other ones."

From shovels and horses to the snowblower

From the middle of the 1800s to the turn of the century, residents in Montreal were responsible for clearing the sidewalk in front of their house — and often the road as well, according to the city.

That changed in 1905, when the city took charge. At that time, labourers were hired to shovel snow for 25 cents an hour. The snow was taken away in horse-drawn carts.

A horse-drawn plow is seen in this undated photo. Horses were gradually phased out of snow removal with the rise of the automobile. (McCord Museum)

The first snowblower to clear the streets was purchased by the City of Montreal nearly 100 years ago, in 1928.

The inventor, Arthur Sicard, was born in 1876 in Saint-Léonard-de-Port-Maurice, which is now the Montreal borough of Saint-Léonard. At the time, it was mostly farmland, and Sicard was reportedly inspired by watching a grain thresher at work in a wheat field.

He wondered if a similar device could be used to clear snow, according to the entry on the snowblower in the Canadian Encyclopedia.

In 1925, he completed his first machine and called it "la déneigeuse et souffleuse à neige Sicard," which translates to "the Sicard snowplow and snowblower."

Attached to the front of a truck, the original design featured a scooper with an auger and a fan capable of blowing snow more than 25 metres.

People shovel snow into a truck in Montreal in 1939. Starting in the early 1900s, the city took over management of snow clearing. (Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec)

The rise of the machine

Sicard sold his first snowblowers to the cities of Outrement and Montreal in 1927 for $13,000 each.

By then, Montreal had also begun using more motorized plows to clear snow from the streets.

The City of Montreal acquired two more snowblowers from Sicard's firm in 1938.

The machines included "a combined scraper, conveyor, blower, loading pipe with appropriate hydraulically driven mechanism," according to city archives.

One pamphlet from the Quebec government from the same year described the machine as an "insatiable monster" that could send snow 23 metres into the distance.

A Sicard snowblower in the 1950s. (George A. Driscoll/Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec)

The design proved effective. Sicard "was hailed as a genius who changed the city's relationship with winter," the Canadian Encyclopedia entry said.

Following his death in 1946, Sicard Street was named after him, near the factory where the snowblowers were manufactured.

"His team who built the snow machine, they are in my view great Canadian heroes and they should be celebrated," Laberge said, pointing out that the invention was borne out of necessity as Montreal modernized.

"It's because you need something that you have to invent something."

An undated brochure advertises a Sicard snow remover that "load or throws away the snow rapidly." (City of Montreal archives)

Great expectations

The rise of the automobile, though, also put increased pressure on crews to clear the streets more quickly.

Decades later, in 1962, Montreal city director J.-V. Arpin remarked that the challenge for city workers had become immense, with more than one million people in the city centre each day, including 350,000 in automobiles.

"Motorists expect to drive to work in the morning on a bare pavement after a night storm," he said during a presentation.

These days, that challenge has multiplied, with roughly 800,000 personal vehicles registered on the island and an even greater expectation we should be able to get around quickly after rough weather.

A fleet of Montreal snowblowers in 1974. (City of Montreal archives)

On Wednesday, Mayor Valérie Plante, whose administration has faced criticism for its handling of the cleanup, urged patience.

"We want you to know that everyone is working extremely hard," she said. "We're making good progress, I'd like to say, in the midst of an historic storm."

• 'Be patient,' Montreal mayor says, as snow-removal operation lags

• How Montreal takes 300,000 truckloads of snow off the street every winter

Laberge, for his part, said it's important to remember how much we struggled in the face of snow storms of the past.

"Winters have always been an issue and we and Canadians have always been able to deal with snow storms, the ice, the cold, the winters," he said. "It's part of us."

Constant wintry weather has Ontario snow contractors scrambling for salt | Globalnews.ca

There has been one constant in Ontario this winter: a non-stop amount of snow falling across many areas of the province.

The plethora of snowfalls, both large and small, has left those responsible for clearing roads and parking lots scrambling to keep up.

It has also left private snow contractors with the unenviable task of trying to keep their salt stocks high, as unusually high amount of inclement weather is causing “massive strain,” said Joe Salemi, executive director of Landscape Ontario.

“There’s already a shortage of snow and ice contractors in Ontario because of the liability pressures that are on them,” said, whose association represents landscapers and private snow removal companies.

“So when you have all of these snowfalls all at once, it just puts massive strain on the capacity and the bandwidth of these contractors to make sure that our parking lots and roadways and walkways are clear.”

Global News meteorologist Ross Hull said Wednesday that Toronto had received about triple the average snowfall in February, while Ottawa had also seen more than double than usual.

“Average snowfall at YYZ for the month of February is 24.3 cm (YYZ has received 71.6 cm so far this month),” he explained.

“The average snowfall for the entire winter weather season is 108.5 cm (YYZ has received 125.8 cm so far this season).”

Meanwhile Ottawa, which tends to see more snow in the winter than their southern cousins, has seen 93.4 cm by February 19, while it historically averages 43.3 cm, according to Hill. He said that Canada’s capital will generally see around 223 cm but it had already seen 193 cm by Wednesday.

“All of these small snow events require a salt application,” Salemi said.

“But when we saw this bigger snowfall, it’s the plow crew that goes out, clears all the snow, and then at the very end, there’s a salt application. So all of these smaller snow events actually eat up a lot more salt than one big snowfall.”

Among the companies feeling the pinch is Draglam Salt, which posted a warning on their website noting that prices could be affected by the salts shortage.

The world’s largest salt mine is located in Goderich, Ont. Salemi said the wintry weather has forced Compass Minerals, the mine’s owner, to ration its salt supply as it provides much of his members with their salt.

“The salt mines base their production off the last couple of winters snowfall and you know in the GTA and southern Ontario are snowfalls in the last two winters have been pretty light,” Salemi said.

“So getting ready for this winter we’ve seen a ton of snow already and we still have a lot of winter to go.”

The Compass Minterals website says the company ships salt from Goderich to hundreds of communities around the Great Lakes and along the St. Lawrence Seaway.

“The salt mines are actually prioritizing government organizations, the municipalities, the provinces,” Salemi explained.

“So the private contractors are at the back of the line and, you know, they’re able to get salt, but it’s few and far between.”

'A no-win situation'

He said one of his group’s members was forced to send pictures to get a restock after his supplies had run low.

“I was talking to a snow and ice contractor (Thursday) morning, and he said he was down to his last five yards,” Salemi recalled.

“And when he contacted the mine, they asked him to send photo evidence that he was actually down that low. And once he was able to do that, they sent one load of salt where normally he would be able to get two or three at any given time.”

In normal winters, contractors will be able to get a load at a moment’s notice, but it is now a three-to-five day waiting period to get a restock. But Salemi says Mother Nature is to blame.

“It’s a no-win situation for anyone,” he offered.

“No one really wants to be where we’re at right now. it’s the unpredictability and the nature of our weather.”

The lack of salt has forced some of the contractors to exercise a little more caution as they apply their trade.

“They’re servicing all of their clients, but they have to ration the salt,” Salemi said.

“They have to make sure that they’ve got enough supply for everybody.”

Difference between road brine and salt during winter weather | wcnc.com

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — When winter weather hits, it’s important for crews to keep snow and ice off the roads. While there are two ways to do it, there’s a big difference between the two, according to an AccuWeather report. 

Have you ever wondered why road crews sometimes use brine instead of salt?

For years, road crews have used rock salt to melt ice and snow. But, traditional ice only works well when temperatures stay above 15 degrees.

That’s why departments are turning to new methods.

One of the biggest improvements is brine.

It’s a liquid solution applied to roads before a storm. Unlike rock salt, it starts working immediately and is effective at lower temperatures.

Some states even mix in beet juice or other natural additives to improve performance.

So, why do crews put out salt and brine before the snow comes, instead of after? That’s because studies show it takes four times less salt to prevent ice buildup than it would take to remove the snow later.

Pre-wetting roads with brine also helps salt last longer, meaning fewer applications are needed.

With better weather forecasts and proactive strategies, crews are keeping roads safer while saving more money.

Ontario snow and ice customers warned of challenges from possible road salt shortage - Turf & RecTurf & Rec

Ontario faces road salt shortage

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